9. Ugo Tognazzi: From the Farce To the Comedy of Manners part two

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

He could have gone on like that for who knows how long without the film that established him as a complete actor: IL FEDERALE (THE FEDERALIST), directed by Luciano Salce in 1961 and written by him with Castellano and Pipolo. In 1944, in Nazi-occupied Rome, Primo Arcovazzi is a modest non-com in the Black Brigades, a Fascist ingenuosly confident of the "certain victory," zealous and unquestionably a little stupid, who is given the assignment of going to the Abruzzi and arresting and bringing to Rome a distinguished anti-Fascist university professor whom the democrats plan upon making the President of The Republic, once Italy is liberated. Arcovazzi rides off in a motorcycle with sidecar, no automobile being available in those difficult times, and amidst endless vicissitudes returns with the prisoner. Except that the Allies have meanwhile reached Rome and Arcovazzi, who is traveling in a Mussolini black shirt, risks ending up in front of a firing squad; it is the professor who saves his life. The "gimmick" of the comedy is in bringing face to face two opposite mentalities, that of the dim-witted Fascist, who believes in all the slogans of the regime, and that of a liberal intellectual, wise and tolerant, who without ever pinning him to the wall, leads him little by little to understand certain things, to open his mind to a more responsible and critical evaluation of what is going on. In other words, a dialogue on the values of democracy and freedom, carried on in the midst of a hundred incidents and the risk of an active war. Though his partner was an illustrious name in the French cinema and theater like Georges Wilson, Tognazzi succeeded in emerging, drawing an exhilirating but penetrating portrait of his dull-headed Fascist.

In 1962, Luciano Salce would again lead him into the terrain of comedy with LA VOGLIA MATTA (THE MAD DESIRE), based on a short story by Enrico La Stella. Tognazzi's Berlinghieri is a character that would also be found in other films, the middle-aged man who falls madly in love with a much younger girl. Scintillating and gay, the film contains sudden turns of bitterness: Berlinghieri and Francesca do not succeed in overcoming the difference in age and their affair comes to an abrupt end. Tognazzi's third important collaboration with Salce (and the script-writers Castellano and Pipolo) was in 1963 with LE ORE DELL'AMORE (THE HOURS OF LOVE), a pungent, ironical, analysis, with some dramatic moments, of the crisis of a couple after marriage has legalized a long affair: they will go back to loving each other only when they are no longer husband and wife (the same theme, viewed from a completely different angle, of Ingmar Bergman's SCENES OF A WEDDING).

9. Ugo Tognazzi: From the Farce To the Comedy of Manners part one

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

More and less the same age as Sordi (1920) and Manfredi (1921), Ugo Tognazzi, born in Lombardy in 1922, is the third popular name around which the Italian-style comedy developed over the last twenty years. Unlike the others, however, he didn't serve his apprenticeship in the movies: in 1950, when he appeared in his first film (I CADETTI DI GUASCOGNA - THE CADETS OF GASCONY - directed by Mario Mattoli) it was already in a starring role. And yet it took some ten years of successful but mediocre films for him to escape the routine of superficial farces and be given more substantial roles in comedies of manners.

Like Sordi, Tognazzi had worked hard for many years in variety shows, rising from the small-time vaudeville theaters on the outskirts of town to the big musical revues. In 1950, he was still not a popular star like Macario, for whom he was a stand-in, or Toto, even so his revues were among the most modern in their texts (written first by Gelich and then by Scarnicci adn Tarabusi) and in their "formula": he was the first to introduce, instead of the traditional humor, the "nonsense comedy" that became known in Italy especially after the success of Potter's HELLZAPOPPIN; he was the first to mix together big spectacular numbers with more intimate and restrained cabaret acts.

When Italian motion pictures found it convenient to make series of films for every successful variety show comedian, Tognazzi also got his space on the screen; it was at that time, however, that Toto reigned supreme in films of that kind. In 1954, the newly born Italian television gave him the possibility of enormously enlarging his circle of fans with a Saturday night show, UN DUE TRE (ONE TWO THREE), that for several years was at the top of the popularity polls. Working with Raimondo Vianello, his "stooge" but not exactly a partner in the theater, he formed an extraordinary comedy team. Next to Vianelli, tall and thin with washed-out hair, physically and psychologically immersed in a British kind of humor played absolutely deadpan, Tognazzi stood out both because of his extraverted dash and the cunningness of a certain crafty guile.

In the days of the great popularity of stage revues, Tognazzi was primarily an eminent representative of that genre of entertainment and secondly a familiar television face; the movies were a sideline, nothing particularly important, in which he alternated leading roles in second-rate films and brief appearances as "guest star" in some even important films. The latter was the case with CHE GIOIA VIVERE! (WHAT A JOY TO BE ALIVE!), directed in Italy in 1961 by French director Rene Clement and starring another Frenchman, Alain Delon, an affectionate and light-hearted portrayal of 1921 Rome through an endearing family of anarchists. Tognazzi for the first time called attention to himself in a secondary but amusingly sketched role: a Bulgarian terrorist who has come to Rome to carry out an assassination.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part nine

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Nino Manfredi, an obviously gifted creative actor, has almost always collaborated on the scripts of his films, has often supplied the story, but has appeared as director only twice. His first attempt, L'AVVENTURA DEL SOLDATO (THE SOLDIER'S ADVENTURE), an episode in L'AMORE DIFFICILE (DIFFICULT AMOURS), has already been mentioned with regard to the episode film genre. The second was a full-length film, PER GRAZIA RICEVUTA (FOR MERCY RECEIVED). After having been a top box-office success in Italy in 1971, it also received unanimous critical acclaim and won the prize for the best "first film" at the Cannes Festival. Despite that, Manfredi, curiously enough, has never directed another film.

PER GRAZIA RICEVUTA (FOR MERCY RECEIVED) indicates, among other things, what a vast range can be covered by Italian-style comedy. After having confronted the simple satire of manners and the great political and civil satire, with this film the genre touches upon the fundamental theme of religion, of religious training, of the relationship between man and God. In PER GRAZIA RICEVUTA (FOR MERCY RECEIVED), there is a basic autobiographical strain, but reinvented in the imagination so that the plot bears no specific relation to Manfredi's real life. The leading character, Benedetto, while about to undergo an operation, weighs the pros and cons of his life and in a flash-back re-experiences his childhood in a small Ciociaro village, when he lived with an aunt in a very strict household from the religious and moral point of view and where the slightest mention of sex was considered sinful. Later, Benedetto makes the acquaintance of a pharmacist who declares he is atheist and a "free thinker", falls in love with his daughter, Giovanna, but doesn't marry her in church in order not to conform to a ceremony he no longer believes in. He would be very disappointed, however, when the pharmacist on his death bed suddenly calls the priest and confesses, receiving the sacrament of the "Extreme Unction". The film is neither fideistic nor anti-religious or anti-clerical in intent: it represented a serious approach to the problem of a certain form of traditional education and forcefully stressed the importance of the religious problem in man even in modern society. Manfredi brought into high relief the environment of the country and the small town that surrounds and conditions the characters, making use of humor for an effective analysis of that world. Particularly worth of note the excellent performance of the American actor Lionel Stander in the exquisitely Italian role of the pharmacist.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part eight

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

When he was running up and down Italy shooting a television program about passengers on second-class trains, the director Nanni Loy ran into a strange character, a man out of work who had "invented" a profession by boarding trains at night to sell people coffee, without a license and without paying taxes. This gave rise to CAFFE EXPRESS (COFFEE EXPRESS: 1979), one of Loy's best films and one of Manfredi's most searching and complete performances.

The actor builds the character with the greatest care, starting with the slightly ridiculous external features, stressing his unintentional parody of the real coffee-vendors hired to serve Pullman cars, but also giving glimpses, between one gesture and the other, of the secret suffering of a poor devil constantly exposed to the risk of being arrested. Loy, who like all his generation of directors was formed in the neo-realistic school, returns with warmth and conviction to that "shadowing" of the common people in their everyday behavior dear to Zavattini and exploits the multifarious world of a second-class carriage for a whole series of even fleeting human portraits. There was probably no need to add an element of suspense (the gang of robbers pursuing the coffee-vendor who has refused to become their accomplice and the policemen on his trail to take him to jail), nor that superfluous pathetic touch given by the presence on the train of his son, who has run away from boarding-school to come home to his father. In any case, the film is intense, deeply felt and amusing, one of the finest achievements of Italian-style comedy.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part seven

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Chaplinesque echoes are also to be found in Marcello, a meek, dreamy violinist who lives with a wife, a prostitute by profession but deeply in love with him, and a cat, the role played by Manfredi in ATTENTI AL BUFFONE! (LOOK OUT FOR THE JESTER!: 1975) by director and writer Alberto Bevilacqua, written by Bevilacqua and Manfredi. It's a wholly allegorical story about a former Fascist party official bound up in the myth of the vanished Empire (an excellent Eli Wallach) who invades Marcello's house and empties it, first carrying off his wife and then insisting that the violinist come along too as a sort of "court jester".

John Steinbeck's powerful novel, TOBACCO ROAD, has been suggested as the model for BRUTTI, SPORCHI E CATTIVI (UGLY, DIRTY AND NASTY) by Ettore Scola, one of the most important achievements of both the director and the leading actor, Nino Manfredi. It is an atypical comedy that lies outside any formerly attempted model, though some remote reference to neo-realism might be traceable. The action is set in a ramshackle shanty not far from St. Peter's Square in Rome where a "big, happy family" of Southern immigrants lives all piled together, sons, wives, grandchildren, and all revolving around the foul, old, dirty, arrogant and violent Grandpa Giacinto. A farce teeming with vigorous popular spirits, it brings to the scene an almost sub-human state of existence, people united only by instinct and spasmodically craving the money they know Giacinto has hidden somewhere. Manfredi completely re-invents himself, making himself older, brutish and ugly, in a memorable creation, surrounded moreover by non-professional actors, chosen from the real inhabitants of the Roman shanty-towns. Scola won the prize for the best directing at the Cannes Festival.

A negative character, but not without arguments in his favor, Barletta, a public accountant, is the protagonist of IL GIOCATTOLO (THE TOY), directed in 1979 by Giuliano Montaldo and written by Sergio Donati, Manfredi and Montaldo on a story by Donati (a popular detective story writer and skilled in creating situations of suspense). The film shows how a man who is not only normal but positively meek and shy, with nothing but a hobby of clocks, can gradually turn into an extraordinarily violent gunman. In order to compensate for the frustrations of his dreary life as an office clerk, Barletta starts going to a rifle range and practices shooting, imitating the cowboy heroes of the Far West he idolizes. Then when a policeman who is a friend of his is shot down before his very eyes he reacts, almost without realizing it, by killing the assassin. So he becomes famous, the local hero in all the headlines, but he also becomes a different person. He is seized by a kind of passion for killing, the pistol "toy" becomes an instrument of death. Manfredi is extraordinary, though Montaldo's direction seems uncertain as to what level to work on, and alternates grotesqueness and realism with some lapes in taste.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part six

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Among films based on the contemporary history of Italy, GIROLIMONI - IL MOSTRO DI ROMA (GIROLIMONI - THE MONSTER OF ROME) was much more vivid. Damiano Damiani evocatively depicts the Rome of 1925 at the time of the coup d'etat which brought Benito Mussolini to power. The Girolimoni "case" caused great excitement in the press and in public opinion. In involved an amateur photographer accused of being the "monster" who, latter-day Jack The Ripper, had terrorized the popular quarters of Borgo and Ponte, raping and murdering little girls. An ambitious policeman, giving credence to the declaration of a jealous husband, arrested the innocent Girolimoni, thus setting into motion an implacable judiciary machine. It was in the interests of the Mussolini regime to show the efficiency of the police and it exploited the "case" in order to re-introduce capital punishment in Italy. But the evidence against the accused was shaky and after almost a year in jail he had to be released.

The newspapers, which had headlined his name for months, were ordered, however, not to report his release and so the poor man returned to normal life destroyed, with the reputation of being a murderer. It is a thoroughly dramatic film which, strictly speaking, lies outside the present survey. But if Nino Manfredi is so convincing and effective in picturing the progressive destruction of Girolimoni's personality, first a self-confident man and great conqueror of women, then the shadow of himself, it is because he builds his role by also making use of those fleeting touches of irony and humor typical of comedy, and in this way everything becomes truer and more human.

If GIROLIMONI - IL MOSTRO DI ROMA (GIROLIMONI - THE MONSTER OF ROME) is a dramatic film with a character who also reflects the comedy tradition, PANE E CICCOLATA (BREAD AND CHOCOLATE: 1974), one of the most significant films in the recent Italian cinema, deals with a dramatic subject along the lines of the grotesque, references even to the classical German Expressionism of the '20s. Based on a story by Franco Brusati, the director of the film and a distinguished playwright, the script, written by Brusati, Jaia Fiastri and Nino Manfredi, seeks to depict the situation of the Italian immigrant in Switzerland, starting with a Southerner who has a good job as a waiter, but is fired and loses his residence permit. So half undercover he begins to do every sort of odd job and they all come to nothing, till one day he is ordered out of the country. Manfredi clearly has in mind Chaplin's tramp when, with infinite subtlety, he sketches the figure of this naive worker who fails to become "intergrated" and like many immigrants is caught between homesickness for the land he has left behind and the desire to become a permanent part of the host country. There is also the bitter portrayal of a misunderstanding, that which exists between certain citizens of a rich country and the poor immigrant who is wanting in elegant manners and dresses badly and is thus viewed with contempt. To sustain so deeply committed a film in a grotesque key without falling into the farce was very difficult, but Brusati's creative gifts merge perfectly with Manfredi's creative and dramatic gifts, assuring successful results. The film won the Silver Bear at the Berling Festival.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part five

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

That Manfredi refused to limit herself to a set character does not mean, however, that he denied those Ciociaria peasant roots which go to make up an important part of his personality. His Marino Balestrini, a village barber, in STRAZIAMI, MA DI BACI SAZIAMI (TORTURE ME, BUT FILL ME WITH KISSES: 1968) by Dino Risi, extracts from precisely this social and geographical background its perfect description as a character. The story, written by Age and Scarpelli, more than once touches upon death creating out of it occasions for laughter: when the young engaged couple tries to commit suicide for love, when Marino, out of a job, jumps into the Tiber, lastly when he and his former girlfriend try to bump off her deaf-mute husband. A paradoxical plot leads to a complex story, now caricatural now pathetic, where the American actress, Pamela Tiffin, is the pretty village girl fought over by the barber, Nino Manfredi, and her husband, Ugo Tognazzi. RIUSCIRANNO, I NOSTRI EROI A RITROVARE IL LORO AMICO MISTERIOSAMENTE SCOMPARSO IN AFRICA? (WILL OUR HEROES SUCCEED IN FINDING THEIR FRIEND WHO HAS MYSTERIOUSLY DISAPPEARED IN AFRICA?) is the mile-long title of a bizarre film Ettore Scola made in 1968 on a script by Age, Scarpelli and the director. The remote inspiration of the film is Stanley's trip to find Livingstone, but bought up to date and adapted to modern times. It would be a Roman publisher, Alberto Sordi, accompanied by one of his employees, Bernard Blier, in the capacity of collaborator, driver and in other words, slave, to go to Africa to follow the traces, at first feeble then more and more substantial, of his brother-in-law, Nino Manfredi, who had disappeared months before. They would find him in a native village, acting as witch doctor to the tribe and not the least bit anxious to go home: in that particular status he makes his protest against industrial civilization. Age and Scarpelli were also the authors of ROSOLINO PATERNO, SOLDATO... (ROSOLINO PATERNO, SOLDIER...), directed in 1970 by Nanni Loy and meant as a vehicle to launch Manfredi on the American market. But after TUTTI A CASA (EVERYBODY HOME), it was difficult to say something new about the war in Italy in 1943, and the comedy with pretences of historical popularization did not turn out as incisive as it could have been. It tells of the vicissitudes of an Allied commando unit parachuted into Sicily at the beginning of 1943 to prepare for the Anglo-American landing. One member of it is an Italian prisoner-of-war, the soldier of the title, who is supposed to act as guide but who is interested only in escaping to go see his home-town girl-friend. Manfredi co-starred with three American actors: Peter Falk, Jason Robards, Jr. and Martin Landau (who later became popular on television in the Space 1999 series).

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part four

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Manfredi steps out of the sphere of merely national prestige with the light-hearted OPERAZIONE SAN GENNARO (OPERATION SAN GENNARO: 1966) by Dino Risi, a sort of parody of the American "hard-boiled film" set in Naples amidst the Song Festival and the procession of San Gennaro, with a "guappo" (that is, a local gang leader) who joins up with three Americans (the leader of the three was played by Harry Guardino) to steal the fabulous treasure of San Gennaro preserved in the underground vaults of the Naples Cathedral. Everything goes wrong, despite the advice of the expert Don Vincenzo (Toto), who receives his clients in jail, and the unfortunate thieves end up carrying the statue of the saint in procession, after having unintentionally helped discover the treasure. Neapolitan folklore and parody of American action films intermingle in a comicalness of high quality. In 1966, it was awarded a silver medal at the Moscow Festival.

In the '60s, many Italian directors were anxious to weigh the pros and cons of their own generation which at an early age had known Fascism and experienced the war and the postwar period. In 1967, Nanni Loy made what was essentially an autobiographical film, IL PADRE DI FAMIGLIA (THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY), which narrated twenty years in the life of a couple - Nino Manfredi, an architect, Republican and Socialist, and Leslie Caron, a girl who believed in the monarchy - from when they met in 1946 during the institutional referendum which gave birth to the Republic up to the middle of the 1960s. It is the exemplary story of a family with children, the crisis of ideals, the fraying of their emotional relations, the temptation of non-commitment, ending with the wife, who has borne most of the weight of the family on her shoulders, being admitted to a clinic with a nervous breakdown. Void of great moments, the film moves in the intermediate range of a good story, with satirical episodes tempered by moments of pathos.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part three

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

1963 was an important year for the actor, called to Spain to play the leading role in one of the most scathing works in its criticism of the social conventions of that country, directed by Luis Berlanga, EL VERDUGO/LA BALLATA DEL BOIA (THE BALLAD OF THE HANGMAN), and in Italy to appear in LA PARMIGIANA (THE GIRL FROM PARMA). The latter was a free adaptation of the novel by Bruna Piatti, written by Piatti, Stafano Strucchi, Maccari, Scola and the director, who was Antonio Pietrangeli. Dora (Belgian actress Catherine Spaak) was a girl who ran away from the Romagna village where she lived with her uncle, a priest, and landed in Parma, where she is torn between an overbearing and vulgar lover and an aspiring, but boring fiance. This Dora, who lets herself go and squander her life without the moral force to make choices has felt a true attraction only for Nino (Manfredi), a small-time swindler, who has even ended up in jail, and makes ends meet as a publicity agent. So she leaves Parma and goes to Rome to be with him, only to discover that he is happily living with another woman. In motion pictures that are often too "Roman", the film has the merit of placing the action in Romagna and of treating ironically the conventions and morals of provincial Italy without assuming a moralistic tone. Manfredi, with his characteristic restraint, acts the part of an ambiguous figure, neither good nor good-for-nothing. He gives the lucid portrayal of another ambiguous publicity agent in Pietrangeli's best film, IO LA CONOSCEVO BENE (I KNEW HER WELL: 1965), another portrait of a woman who lets herself go, model, then starlet in mythological films, mistress of this man or that, in the end a suicide. Here Italian-style comedy touches its limit and trespasses into the normal dramatic film, always sustained, however, by zones of irony, by gags and intervals of smiles.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part two

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

It is no accident that the film which enabled Manfredi to attain an enduring popularity, after a decade or so of a respectiable career, was L'IMPIEGATO (THE OFFICE CLERK: 1959) by Gianni Puccini, written by him and Puccini together with future director Elio Petri and the critic Tommaso Chiaretti. It's a film that lies outside the traditional models and vaguely resembles THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY by Norman Z. McLeod, which made a star of Danny Kaye. Here too Nando is a modest and shy office clerk who escapes into dreams, where he imagines all sorts of romantic adventures with a ravishing pin-up. By day, instead, he is persecuted by a terrible woman inspector who has been sent from the main office to teach the company personnel new marketing techniques, which the poor man is incapable of learning. A familiarity with the Italian white-collar milieu is mingled with a recollection of Thurber's short stories in a successful blend of subtle and intelligent humor.

A CAVALLO DELLA TIGRE (RIDING THE TIGER) is the result of Manfredi's encounter with the director Luigi Comencini, an encounter that turned out to be highly fruitful. Written by Age, Scarpelli, Comencini and Monicelli, it tells the bitter-sweet story of a poor dupe, in jail for simulation of a crime, who escapes but once outside, like Toto in Rossellini's DOV'E LA LIBERTA? (WHERE'S FREEDOM), runs into disappointments of all kinds, deciding in the end to let himself be caught and taken back to jail. The story does not lack in light comedy and amusing gags, but it's to Manfredi's credit that he succeeded in hitting upon a tone of controlled restraint, with no farcical exaggerations, no over-coloring of the situations.

8. Nino Manfredi Outside the Set Character part one

In 1959, Nino Manfredi appeared on the TV show Canzonissima.

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Among the actors to whom the film comedy owes its success, Nino Manfredi represents an opposite case from Sordi. While Sordi, as we have seen, though at home in every kind of role, met with success only when he got his "personage" into focus, Manfredi, starting off with a "personage" that suited him, did everything to shake it off and to impose himself as an actor who knew how to "invent himself" upon each occasion.

Born near Rome in the province of Frosinone in 1921 (a year after Sordi), with a degree in law and an acting diploma from the National Academy of Dramatic Art, Manfredi started his artistic career in the theater, winning acclaim at an early age in a wholly "serious" repetoire: Buchner, Arthur Miller, Cocteau, Saroyan, Shakespeare, Sophocles, Pirandello, Moliere, Anouilh, Clifford Odets, Ibsen... And yet, a distinguished theater critic, Enzo Ferriesi, seeing him in 1947 in Cocteau's THE TWO-HEADED EAGLE, already realized that "that...you man, Manfredi" was "perfectly prepared for those difficult shifts from the pathetic to the humorous, from the solemn to the wild, which American films may well have gotten us used to, but which in the theater... are anything but common." Starting as a dramatic actor (but he was also an excellent Harlequin in a Goldoni comedy), Manfredi was therefore predisposed to comedy.

He would subsequently venture into the musical revue, work for the radio and ultimately on television: in a very popular evening show, Canzonissima (1959), he would make a big hit, drawing upon his peasant origins to create the highly amusing figure of a Ciociaro shepherd (the Ciociaria is a hilly region near Rome). This would have been his set character: in a film world linked to the city and to industrial society, a hillbilly type could have unquestionably been a success and stood out from the others. But it was precisely this that Manfredi didn't want. So he preferred not making films rather than accept the easy way of repeating ad nauseam the "shepherd from Ceccano."

So Nino Manfredi's personal contribution - he too was an actor who was at the same time an author - to the Italian film comedy would be that he broke the "cliche" of the set character, and resorted to psychological observation to give life to different human types. His sound professional preparation and his theatrical apprenticeship enabled him, also on a stylistic level, to apply different approaches, in a constant exploration of style.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part ten

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

As a director, Sordi then decided to bring his run-of-the-mill Italian "personage" into contact with great historical events in POLVERE DI STELLE (STAR DUST), written with Bernardino Zapponi and Ruggero Maccari on a story by the latter. The agonizing period, 1943/44, between the fall of Fascism, the armistice and the division of Italy in two, the Germans on one side, the Allies on the other, is recounted through the eyes of a second-rate vaudeville team, Mimmo and Dea (Sordi and Monica Vitti). The armistice takes them by surprise in a small Abruzzi town, at night they run into the car of the fleeing King on the road to Pescara, are embarked by the Fascists and carried to Venice, where Mussolini's republic has concentrated the world of show business, manage to escape and make their way to liberated Bari. Here, an audience craving entertainment after all the hardships endured cheers and applauds them, the only vaudeville company around (the important ones have remained in Rome or are in the North), and leads an impresario to organize a big musical revue all for them in the most important theater in town. After years of hunger and humiliation, success is theirs. But whell all of Italy is liberated and the true glories of the music hall return to Bari, nothing remains for Mimmo and Dea but to go back to the small-time suburban houses, to the dreary life of before. Perhaps a little too long, POLVERE DI STELLE (STAR DUST) is an amusing and at the same time touching description of an epoch, where the grotesque is always used with unfailing subtlety.

In any case, Sordi's best film as a director is FINCHE C'E GUERRA C'E SPERANZA (AS LONG AS THERE'S WAR THERE'S HOPE: 1974), written with Leo Benvenuti and Pietro De Bernardi, where, with a critical relentlessness that gradually shifts the film from the satirical tone of the beginning to the bitterly dramatic tone of the ending, he describes the cynical personality of an arms dealer, Pietro Chiocca, who moves from one African county to the other, exploiting the tensions and conflicts between recently independent states as a way of making money, selling arms indifferently to both sides. When his family, influenced by a newspaper campaign, turns against him, Pietro shoulders them with their responsibilities: they have accepted the prosperity, indeed the wealth that dirty work has made possible and which they are not about to give up.

To complete the picture of Sordi's contribution to comedy as civil satire, two films based on the sanitary system and on the figure of the doctor must be mentioned: IL MEDICO DELLA MUTUA (THE WELFARE MEDIC: 1968) by Luigi Zampa, based on the novel by Giuseppe D'Agata with a script by Amidei, Sordi and Zampa, draws the malicious portrait of a dishonest doctor, Dr. Terzilli, who cures his patients hastily and sometimes even only by phone in order to accumulate a large number of patients and hence higher fees from the welfare state. The following year, the same character returned in IL PROF. DOTT. GUIDO TERZILLI, PRIMARIO DELLA CLINICA VILLA CELESTE CONVENZIONATA CON LE MUTUE (DR. GUIDO TERZILLI, CHIEF PHYSICIAN OF THE VILLA CELESTE CLINIC, APPROVED BY THE PUBLICH HEALTH SERVICE), directed by Luciano Salce and also written by Amidei and Sordi (with the director). The satirical darts of the first film are slightly blunted, because they are predictable, in this second film, which follows the doctor in his increasingly more successful career, until he transforms his clinic into a rest-home for rich old ladies.

UN BORGHESE PICCOLO PICCOLO (A PETTY PETTY BOURGEOIS: 1977) by Mario Monicelli, from the novel by Vincenzo Cerami, does not, strictly speaking, pertain to the comedy genre, indeed in the whole second part it is a gloomy tragic film. It is worth mentioning, however, for the way both the director and the actor succeed, as is typical of comedy, in starting off on a light tone, with various decidedly comic situations (for example, a secret meeting of initiation into a Massonic lodge), and from there to proceed through ever more crucial turnings of the screw to the unrelenting brutality of the final images. In 1979, lastly, he confronted one of the theater classics of all times, Moliere, in the film version of IL MALATO IMMAGINARIO (LE MALADE IMMAGINAIRE/THE HYPOCHONDRIAC), directed by Tonino Cervi, with the action shifted to 18th century Rome, still the capital of the Papal States. Though the adaptation is questionable and certain references to modern-day terrorism seem strained, Sordi's performance is outstanding, pervaded even, as it is, by a certain Pirandello flavor, by virtue of which his Argante, beneath the appearance of a weak and cowardly man who locks himself into the house, frightened by everything, is a lucid critic of the ills of society.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part nine

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

In 1966, Alberto Sordi, while not ceasing to be an actor, took up directing, a point of arrival that was imaginable from the very beginning of his career. FUMO DI LONDRA (double meaning: SMOKE OF LONDON or GRAY FLANNELS), his first film written with Sergio Amidei, is the delightful caricature of an incurably "Anglophile" Italian, an antique-dealer from Perugia who has a passion for a certain England that was disappearing: the bowler hat, the umbrella on the arm, the austere gray flannel clothes, the fox hunts, the great country homes, the city pubs, the Queen's guards. He goes to London on business and finds all that, but gradually realizes that there is a new emerging England, the England of the young who dress in casual-wear, adore the Beatles (we're in the '60s) and even take drugs. Without being particularly deep, FUMO DI LONDRA draws a witty picture, not only of the leading character but also of this changing England.

UN ITALIANO IN AMERICA (AN ITALIAN IN AMERICA), made in 1967, is richer in satirical observations and more acute. After the antique dealer with his passion for England, this time it is a gas station attendant with a passion for the United States. Thanks to a television show organized by one of the major networks, the obscure Giuseppe, an anonymous Roman gas-station attendent, is invited to New York, all expenses paid, to be reunited, under the eyes of millions of spectators, with his immigrant father whom he hasn't heard of in thirty years. The opening sequence, with the pungent description of a typical American television show, all keyed to the pathetic aspects of the situation, is perhaps the best thing in the film, though the lively, scathing tone is subsequently maintained in describing Giuseppe's progressive disillusionment with his father, who is a mediocre petered-out adventurer, and with a reality that is more complicated and difficult than he had dreamed of. The film, also starring an excellent Vittorio De Sica, was entirely shot in the United States.

7. Alberto Sordi Personification of the Average Italian part eight

From: COMEDY ITALIAN STYLE

by Ernesto G. Laura

Many directors turned to film comedy to criticize the transformation of ideals, the renouncement of one's self for the sake of a quiet life or for getting ahead. In 1955, Sordi had been the symbol of this negative figure, interested cynically and exclusively in living comfortably under all skies and regimes, in L'ARTE DI ARRANGIARSI (THE ART OF GETTING ALONG), the last film Vitaliano Brancati conceived and wrote for director Luigi Zampa. Sasa Scimoni is a social and political climber, alternately friend and enemy - the setting is Sicily - of the Socialists in the immediate post-war period, then a Fascist, then a Communist, finally a Christian Democrat, a hoarder of riches thanks to swindles and frauds for which, however, he ends his career in prison. A savage moral fable about the dishonesty and corruption of people near the centers of power, it represented one of Zampa's finest films of civil satire. The reserve of such a figure, the one ready to camouflage himself so as not to displease the powerful, is to be found in Luigi Comencini's film IL COMMISSARIO (THE POLICE INSPECTOR: 1962), written by Age and Scarpelli. The young police inspector Lombardozzi, interpreted by a Sordi impressively restrained in the comic episodes and given up exclusively to irony, conducts an investigation that brings to light certain private "affairs" concerning a well-known political figure that it would be prudent to keep a secret. Faced with the possibility that, in order to provide a version of the facts favorable to his superiors, an innocent person would spend years in prison, Lombardozzi, ignoring pressures and threats, has him released and finishes off the investigation in his own fashion, but is forced to leave the police.

Another aspect of the post-war period that appeared in films long before the world-wide success of THE GODFATHER was the mafia. MAFIOSO, directed in 1962 by Alberto Lattuada and written by Age and Scarpelli on the basis of a synopsis by Rafael Azcona and Marco Ferreri, is a pungent grotesque comedy that leads to high drama. Sordi plays the role of a serious and honest Sicilian employee with wife and children who for years has lived and worked in Milan. Upon returning to his home town for a vacation, he is forced by the local Mafia "godfather" to fly secretly to America and murder an underworld "boss" whom only an unknown killer could get near to. So the serious ordinary man becomes a murderer, then flies back to Italy and picks up his former live in Milan as if nothing had happened. Here again we have the uncommon black humor of Azcona and Ferreri, but the story puts its finger, with great precision and determination, on the Mafia plague in Sicily.